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Printed Circuit

Printed Circuit

By: Siemens Digital Industries Software
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Welcome to The Printed Circuit, a Siemens Podcast. Hosted by Stephen Chavez, each episode will focus on trends, challenges, and opportunities across the printed circuit engineering industry. Topics range from achieving supply chain resilience, to learning PCB design best practices.Siemens Digital Industries Software
Episodes
  • Communication, Trust, Process: The Three Pillars Every Co-Design Team Must Get Right

    Communication, Trust, Process: The Three Pillars Every Co-Design Team Must Get Right
    Jun 30 2026
    What you’ll learn… (00:46) Charlene and Terrie's origin story: a teacher, a career-changer, and 45 years of PCB experience (02:29) What concurrent design actually means — and the "chasing the sun" shift model (04:10) Why communication is the foundation of co-design — and what happens when it breaks down (05:57) The trust factor: building confidence in a teammate's work to hand it straight to the customer (10:06) Where concurrent design goes south in real organizations (11:31) Version control without PLM software: the date-letter-initials convention (15:52) Partitioning a complex motherboard without enterprise software — and who holds the master (21:38) Upfront setup essentials: Gerber outputs, stackup lock-in, and avoiding the rework avalanche (27:40) Treating co-design like a scientist: test revisions and never saying "it won't work" (32:41) The CAM2 success story: world-standard connector, half the typical timeline (37:03) AI in PCB design: a tool for experienced designers — and the lesson from the taping-board era More about the episode… In this episode of the Printed Circuit Podcast, host Steph Chavez sits down with Charlene McCauley, Senior PCB Designer and owner of McCauley Design Group LLC, and Terrie Duffy, Principal Electrical Engineer of AI Automation at Dell Technologies. Charlene brings 45 years of industry experience, including server planer design at Dell and PCB instruction at Austin Community College — where Terrie was her student, worked alongside her for nine years, and now teaches the course herself. The conversation is a practical look at what concurrent and co-design require beyond the tooling: master file ownership, cross-discipline communication, and version control discipline. Real war stories — wrong revisions loaded, external teams deviating from specs — illustrate where co-design breaks down. The CAM2/DDR5 connector project anchors the episode: a world-standard achievement completed in four to five years by a small, tightly coordinated team. The episode closes on AI — not a threat to experienced designers, but a tool that rewards those willing to learn it. Connect with Steph Chavez: LinkedIn Website Connect with Charlene McCauley: LinkedIn McCauley Design Group Website Connect with Terrie Duffy: LinkedIn
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    44 mins
  • The Library Is the Foundation: Why Design Reuse Is Energy Conservation

    The Library Is the Foundation: Why Design Reuse Is Energy Conservation
    Jun 23 2026
    What you’ll learn… (00:12) Why design reuse is energy conservation — and IP management is energy management (05:15) How the shift from physical tape-ups to CAD opened the door to reusable design data (08:09) The electric car analogy: charging cheap vs. designing under pressure (11:32) War stories from the field: reverse-engineering an F-14 Tomcat board and the square-pin-in-a-round-hole disaster (17:07) What happens when every designer controls their own library — and why that's a nightmare (21:33) Family trees, variants, and the art of tracking design history across decades (25:47) Why even great processes break down — and the role of the resident expert in keeping libraries honest (30:26) The designer as cross-pollinator: bridging mechanical, electrical, and manufacturing worlds (38:19) AI as a routing engine: from overnight Cadnetics autorouting to Tesla autopilot — and what both teach us about human oversight More about the episode… In this episode of the Printed Circuit Podcast, host Steph Chavez welcomes Paul Fleming, Senior Printed Circuit Board Consultant and IPC-certified design instructor — a 45-year industry veteran who built his own PCB service bureau in San Diego before spending two decades as an application engineer across Cadnetics, Cadence, Mentor Graphics, and Siemens, and becoming an educator through the IPC Designer Council. The conversation tackles why design reuse and IP management are the hidden levers behind every fast, cost-efficient hardware program — and why neglecting them is a tax companies keep paying long after the original engineer has left. Paul frames it simply: decisions are energy, and every design artifact is either stored potential or future debt. War stories from a reverse-engineered F-14 Tomcat board to a connector library defect that cascaded across hundreds of shipped units make the stakes concrete. Paul also addresses the human side: the self-preservation instinct that fragments shared libraries, the management–engineering gap that lets bad habits compound, and why the PCB designer — bridging mechanical, electrical, and manufacturing domains — holds more organizational leverage than almost any other role on the product team. The episode closes with a candid take on AI: powerful when an experienced engineer is watching the road, dangerous when they're not. Connect with Steph Chavez: LinkedIn Website Connect with Paul Fleming: LinkedIn PCEA Website
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    45 mins
  • Trust Is Good, Control Is Better: Designing Hardware Faster Without Betting It All on AI

    Trust Is Good, Control Is Better: Designing Hardware Faster Without Betting It All on AI
    Jun 16 2026
    What if the biggest bottleneck in hardware design isn't your engineer's skill — it's the sheer volume of manual work standing between a great idea and a working schematic? And once you decide to embrace AI-assisted design, how do you make sure the output is actually trustworthy enough to build from? What you’ll learn… (00:12) Why fragmented workflows hit SMB hardware teams hardest (02:39) The real cost of going from requirements to prototype without specialist support (07:33) How functional block-level design changes early decisions — including when a SOM beats building from scratch (12:04) Why system-level abstraction catches wrong-path decisions before they reach the schematic (14:39) The "rubber duck debugging" effect: how AI clarifies requirements before they become costly mistakes (17:54) The biggest AI misconception in hardware design — and why the engineer must own every decision (20:30) How CELUS's NXP collaboration delivers manufacturer-validated, human-in-the-loop solutions (25:05) Why abstraction-first tools help SMBs take on projects that would otherwise be out of reach (28:19) The CELUS Success Program: high-touch onboarding for SMBs on the Siemens instance More about the episode… In this episode of the Printed Circuit Podcast, host Steph Chavez welcomes back Antonio Becerra Esteban, VP of Customer Success at CELUS — a physicist-turned-engineer with experience at Infineon and Altium who now leads the team ensuring customers extract real value from the platform. The conversation tackles the fragmented, manual journey from requirements to schematic that burdens small hardware teams. Antonio explains how CELUS's functional block-level design approach lets engineers define system architectures, navigate component trade-offs with an AI assistant, and output fully-interconnected schematics — illustrating the point with a Linux-based HMI example where the right abstraction layer turns a complex MPU build into a simple SOM selection. On the trust question, Antonio is direct: the engineer must own every decision. CELUS backs this up with manufacturer-validated design blocks, transparent sourcing, and a human-in-the-loop process — putting engineers in the driving seat rather than asking them to ship whatever the model produces. SMBs can join CELUS' Success Program by sending an email to cs@celus.io. Connect with Steph Chavez: LinkedIn Website Connect with Antonio Becerra Esteban: LinkedIn CELUS Website
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    30 mins
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